Mike Stott, who has died of lung cancer aged 65, was a prolific playwright for the stage, television and radio, renowned for celebrating the quirkiness and robust charm of "ordinary life" in the post-industrial north-west of his native Rochdale and rural Lancashire across to Todmorden, West Yorkshire, where he settled in 1977.

He was best known for one of the most uproariously funny plays of the last half century, Funny Peculiar (capsule summary: "fellatio in the Pennines"), which premiered in a German production in 1973 at the Bochum Schauspielhaus, where the director Peter Zadek was in charge, before storming the Liverpool Everyman in 1975 and then the Mermaid Theatre and the Garrick in London the following year. The play gave riotous expression to Stott's main comic theme, both absurd and liberating – the idea that the permissive society might penetrate the outer reaches of northern, provincial humdrum existence.

No one who saw the 1975 production, directed by Alan Dossor, will forget the sight of Richard Beckinsale as the sexually inquisitive grocer Trevor Tinsley, having fallen into his own cellar while pursued by a village widow, being lovingly serviced under the bedclothes by his wife (played by Julie Walters) while trussed up like a plaster-cast chicken in hospital. Trevor achieved sexual delirium while groaning in agony, in the same way as he registered Woodstock-style naked liberation while being chased through his own little garden, or a renewed sense of professional pride while engaged in a slapstick battle of cream puffs and other confectionery with an obstreperous salesman, played by Pete Postlethwaite.

Stott's writing flourished in this decade, and he was soon turning out television and radio plays of great vitality, peopled by a gallery of loveable local characters, cementing his place in the pantheon of popular northern writers which also included Alan Plater, Willy Russell, John Godber and Peter Tinniswood, a group who might yet challenge the critical bias towards the metropolitan London playwrights.

Stott, an only child, was born in Rochdale, where his father was a storekeeper for the gas board and his mother ran a grocery shop. He attended Littleborough primary school and Bury grammar before reading drama at Manchester University, where he studied under Hugh Hunt and Stephen Joseph, and met his future wife, Christine, another drama student.

The connection with Joseph took him to the old Scarborough Library Theatre as a stage manager for Alan Ayckbourn, whose work is an obvious and important influence. His first play at Scarborough, in 1965, was about Mata Hari, but he immediately moved south to join the Royal Shakespeare Company as a house dramatist on two Peter Brook productions, US, at the Aldwych, a protest play about the Vietnam war scripted mainly by Adrian Mitchell, and a new version of The Tempest at the Roundhouse.

Stott contributed some material on the idea of Caliban ruling the island: "All men will be splattered. I'll sprinkle their eyeballs all over the island, so I can see everything that happens. I'll build me a palace of dead men's bones, glued together with flesh and fat. I'll have carpets of human hair. I'll use their pricks to make a giant whip, with bollocks for knots. I would let Prospero live. He would be my royal bog."

He was soon inventing his own subversive sketches of love and homicide in the cartoonish Erogenous Zones (1969) in the Royal Court's upstairs studio, and in 1970 he began his long association with BBC radio. The success of Funny Peculiar led to an attachment with the Hampstead Theatre, where he adapted Wolfgang Bauer's Ghosts (1975) – an explicitly sexed-up version of Bertolt Brecht's A Respectable Wedding – a companion piece to his version of Georg Büchner's Lenz at the Almost Free Theatre, London, the previous year.

A rich period of television work included two BBC Plays for Today, Soldiers Talking, Cleanly (1978) and Our Flesh and Blood (1977, starring Alison Steadman), and his signature work on the small screen, four episodes of Pickersgill People on BBC2 in 1978, a delightful kaleidoscope of everyday, quirky life in a small northern town, directed by Alan Dossor and Pedr James, with a core cast of Prunella Scales, Bryan Pringle, Sam Kelly and George Costigan, and cameos from Bernard Hill, Eileen O'Brien, David Bradley, Richard Wilson and Antony Sher.

The cast list gives an idea of the quality of television drama in those days, but Stott was unable to sustain that thread of work into the encroaching demands of soap series and the changing TV market, although he did write briefly for Brookside, on Channel 4, and Heartbeat, on Yorkshire Television, and he provided 30 episodes of Granada's The Practice in 1985.

He found the guidelines for such programmes inimical to his unrestrained style of comic writing, but was perfectly happy to channel that impulse into radio plays: Norman (2004) for Johnny Vegas, as a chap on the margins of society; and Chloe (2007) for Steadman, as an imprisoned artist. There were 11 episodes, too, of a very funny Radio 4 series, Bunn & Co (2003), set in a Pennines estate agent's office, starring Keith Barron as the flustered boss.

His last West End play was Ducking Out, a vivid Lancashire housing estate version of the Neapolitan writer Eduardo de Filippo's family comedy Natale in Casa Cupiello – a spaghetti northern, you might say – which moved from the Greenwich Theatre to the Duke of York's in 1982, with Warren Mitchell as a splendidly splenetic paterfamilias, outflanked on all sides by the cruelty and incompetence of his friends and family.

Most recently, Stott wrote one or two radio plays a year for the producer Bruce Hyman's company Above the Title, and had lately completed five episodes of My Mad Grandad, based on a stage play at the Oldham Coliseum in 1984.

He was a keen cyclist, once pedalling the 1,000 miles from Todmorden to the house he and Christine owned in south-west France. They had bought a ruin but developed it as a much-loved destination for friends, family and neighbours over the years. He was a voracious reader and loved baroque music.

Stott is survived by Christine, who moved from acting into teaching, their daughters, Jesse and Rose, and their son, Joe.

Mike Leigh writes: Mike Stott could not tell his closest friends that he had cancer, because, always wanting to be funny, "he didn't know what to say". Not that he was relentlessly funny. His humour was rich and varied – sophisticated, witty, dry, warm, sardonic, gentle, scathing, naughty, often gloriously obscene. He was a great raconteur, reporting direct from the frontline of human frailty – overheard snatches of conversation, odd characters. Recently, he called me to report that, driving across the moors, he had just encountered a group of orthodox Jews, wandering about in the mist with a pack of alsatians. Alison Steadman recalls that when our elder son's birth was imminent, Mike, on learning that we intended to call him Toby, promptly advised her to "check his ears first".

In 1967, Mike was assistant dramaturg to Jeremy Brooks at the RSC. I joined as assistant director, and we were both involved in Theatregoround, the company's new outreach set-up. We became friends instantly, united not least by our healthy Lancashire scepticism. Dinner at Chris and Mike's was always a gastronomic, alcoholic, highly stimulating rollercoaster. Mike was a brilliant philosophical conversationalist, and behind his humour lay a deeply serious spirit. Warmth and humanity pervade his work.

• Michael Anthony Stott, playwright, born 2 January 1944; died 7 September 2009